The NeoAxis Game Engine is a complete integrated development environment for creating interactive 3D graphics including 3D virtual worlds, AAA games, and realistic simulations, created using Ogre. They just released version 0.9, including the following updates:

Parallel-Split Shadow Map (PSSM) technology has been added.

Full support of point light shadows. Shadows are based on cubemaps now.

The new wiki is designed to be a richer experience for users and allows for better tagging, hierarchical page structures, better article relationships, and more. You can find out more in this introductory screencast, and we encourage you to get actively involved with this community space. As with the old wiki, if you have a forum account, you can already log in with the same username / password.

This project was promoted and led by Jacob ‘jacmoe’ Moen and has been a major undertaking on his behalf to get the old wiki data across, to restructure and improve on it, and to take feedback from the community as it developed. Big thanks to jacmoe for all his hard work on this, and to all the community members who have helped get it to the stage where we could put it live.

We’re happy to announce the first maintenance release to the new 1.7 stable branch (codenamed ‘Cthugha’), delivering as per usual a plethora of bug fixes which you can find a list of after the jump. As you would expect there are no feature changes or API breakage in this release – we save those for the unstable development branch – which of course you can grab from Mercurial if you want to join us on the bleeding edge.

So far the source releases and some of the SDKs are ready for download for 1.7.1, if your SDK isn’t updated yet, please be patient as these will come online soon. Or alternatively, try using the source release, it’s really not that scary 🙂

[edit] cg.dll was missing from the early version of the SDKs for Windows, we’re fixing this now, check for updates after 2 May 2010.

We’re happy to pass on the news that Black Fire Games are releasing their title “Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter” today, which includes some lovely space scenes rendered using OGRE. We particularly like their explosions 🙂

Here’s their press release:

Black Fire Games is releasing “Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter”, a cool space shooter using OGRE. The player takes the role of a gunner of a ship escaping an alien invasion in order to warn the rest of humanity of the incoming attack.

Featuring beautiful graphics, cool sound effects, great metal soundtracks, very intense game-play, shop after every level, flexible graphics settings to match old and new hardware and much more. Can you survive all of the 6 worlds of total annihilation and destruction, over 1000 alien fighters and drones, with a couple of mother-ships launching wings like crazy? There is a 30 minute demo period so check it out!

OGRE has now switched its main repository hosting from Subversion to Mercurial, a distributed revision control system (DVCS). From now on, if you want to keep up with the latest code that OGRE developers are working on, you need to be using Mercurial too.

We switched to a DVCS because it gives us far more flexibility when dealing with distributed development, since DVCSs allow local commits for all users and are far more sophisticated at merging disparate development streams, including those which have been ‘disconnected’ from the official version for a while (e.g. user contributions which take a while to develop). Also, users outside the team can collaborate with each other far more easily to create joint patches. For details on how to get the OGRE code from Mercurial, please see our Mercurial developer page.

We chose Mercurial as our DVCS because it supports all developer’s operating systems equally (Windows, OS X, Linux), and because it’s easy to learn when you come from other systems (such as Subversion). We chose BitBucket to host our repository because they allow users to create their own hosted forks of OGRE easily, which encourages collaboration on more complex patches out in the community at large. We’ll still be using Sourceforge for other things such as file releases.

As well as following the new repository direct, you can also follow development as it happens via the following: